Just Readin'

So, I think everyone in the world can agree that The Scottish Play is top-shelf bard. To my understanding, it is the play against which all other tragedies and histories (you could make the argument that Macbeth is a history, don't fight me on this) are measured (except for Richard III , nothing beats Richard III ). There are a lot of reasons why The Scottish Play is the classic that it is, a lot of reasons that scholars love to analyze it. But my favorite thing about Macbeth is that it's so, so, very weird (as in strange, not as in the Weird Sisters - hang on, we're getting there). Seriously; it's bizarre! I know that in a world that contains alligator hot dogs, the vampire birth scene in Breaking Dawn , and the English system, everything else seems fairly normal, but, it you consider it, Macbeth is a really strange play. There are apparitions, witches, and ghosts; at various times in the play, horses eat each other and chimneys are blown down by the force of one

So, if you're ever upset because you've done something that you regret, then you should read Euripides' Medea , because nothing you could ever do could be as bad as what happens in Medea . As you know, I've been reading a lot of Greek tragedy, but their is nothing more Greek or more tragic than this play. Medea is the story of Medea, the wife of Jason (as in Jason and the Argonauts). The backstory is a little complicated, but basically what happens is that Medea betrays her family to help Jason and, in exchange, he marries her and they have two sons. They go to Corinth, where Jason precedes to abandon Medea in order to marry the daughter of the king. Medea's very logical response to this is to kill her children and Jason's new wife. Obviously, there's some nuance I'm skipping over, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Like, seriously, Edgar Allan Poe couldn't make this stuff up. Aside from all the gore, however, this is an interesting